How an Active Everywhere Database Accelerates Hybrid Cloud

How an Active Everywhere Database Accelerates Hybrid Cloud

For almost half a century, the relational database management system (RDBMS) has been the dominant model for database management. These systems—which were designed for centralized workloads—have been enabling organizations to store and query structured data with an unmatched level of reliability even today.

However, today’s business needs are forcing companies to adopt modern data strategies to manage new kinds of data such as sensor data, machine-generated files, mobile and web interactions etc. The amount of useful data that applications require has become so distributed and vast, and the speed at which this data moves is so fast, that it is pushing traditional relational databases beyond their limits. These data systems were designed for structured data sets and not for fast-moving, highly distributed and flexible data needs of today’s businesses.

These new requirements have led to the emergence and increased adoption of NoSQLdatabases, which were designed to process massive amounts of distributed data in real time and without the worry of any downtime. NoSQL databases offer the promise of horizontal scalability and higher availability than relational databases and can deliver infinite capability that is required to meet the growing needs of businesses today.

The Problem with Master-Slave Data Architectures

Today’s business world moves exceptionally fast. Companies that can’t keep pace put their very survival at risk. The applications that businesses rely on to drive their operations need to be scalable and highly available. Otherwise, these systems are more likely to be inadequate and may fail—slowing the companies down significantly.

All relational databases and most NoSQL databases rely on a master-slave data architecture to provide availability. In these systems, all write traffic is controlled by a single point (i.e., the master), even if you add more machines to the database for scale.

This type of architecture inherently introduces bottlenecks to performance and operational complexity, particularly at scale, where lots of concurrent transactions have to be processed (as with distributed applications). It also introduces many potential points of failure—thereby decreasing availability significantly. If the master goes down, the database won’t be able to perform read and write functions until a new master is designated. To resolve this, databases have introduced the concept of multiple masters. This architecture, however, introduces several single points of failure, and oftentimes, performance struggles across distributed networks.

Hybrid Cloud and the Need for an Active Everywhere Database

To ensure high performance and continuous availability for modern applications—which are increasingly deployed in hybridcloudenvironments, we created DataStaxEnterprise (DSE), an Active Everywhere database built on Apache Cassandra’s masterless architecture. With DSE, scaling is truly effortless and highly predictable. In fact, it’s linear. Simply double the number of nodes in the cluster to get double the performance! In addition, continuous availability is built into the core architecture of DSE. Because there is no master, every node is capable of handling read and write requests. In the event a node in the cluster fails, the application automatically gets routed to other nodes that are up without any special coding changes. Once the node is brought back online, data is automatically synchronized with all other nodes.

DSE can be spread across multiple data centers, too. In the event a data center goes down, the database automatically reroutes requests to other data centers that are available. Once that data center is brought back online, DSE reroutes requests once more—ensuring optimal performance in each scenario. The database is also well-suited to multi-cloud deployments and performs the same way.